Russian
The Russian language, also called Great Russian, is a member of the East Slavic
group of the Indo-European family of languages. It is the principal language
of administration in the former Soviet Union and is spoken by about 170 million
people as a first language. It used by at least an additional 100 million as
a second language in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States
(the former Soviet Union) and in Eastern Europe. Closely related to Russian
are the other East Slavic tongues, Ukrainian (Little Russian) and Belarussian
(White Russian). Because of the large number of speakers and leading position
of the former Soviet Union, Russian is one of the world's major languages, and
an official language of the United Nations. It is also important in scientific
writings, and the many great literary works written in Russian have made the
language culturally significant.
The Russian language is written using the Cyrillic alphabet. In the ninth century,
two missionaries - Constantine (who on his deathbed took the monastic name Cyril)
and Methodius - were required to write down the scriptures in Old Church Slavonic
(predecessor to Russian). Constantine invented a writing system for Slavonic,
now known as the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek
alphabet, with about a dozen additional letters invented to represent Slavic
sounds not found in Greek. Cyrillic writing was adopted in Russia in the early
Middle Ages and underwent certain simplifications and regularizations under
Peter the Great which produced the alphabet as it is today.
Sources:
Encyclopedia.com
Lomonosov
University
Information on writing system:
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